I'm with Tomlev2 and Craig Warner. This article is way overgeneralized.
*Many* computer geeks like it dark. *Many* computer geeks like it bright. My experience has been that the split is roughly 50/50 -- from working at a place with private offices, where people could control their own lighting.
And of course, there are all the people who have medical reasons to like bright light. People like Craig, who are above the median age in the industry. People who are low myopes or mild presbyopes -- brighter lighting may increase the depth of field just enough that they don't have to wear glasses to see the screen. People like me, who need bright lighting so that the pupil does not dilate past the blend-zone on our corneas -- this includes people who've had refractive surgery, and people who wear hard contact lenses (which are smaller than soft contacts).
@Craig Warner and Stephen Eilert: Modern fluorescents are electronically-ballasted, so they do not cycle at the line frequency (60 Hz or 50 Hz) -- but at 20-30 KHz. The "refresh" rate on LCD monitors refers to how fast the image data changes -- not to how fast the backlight cycles.

I've talked about computer workstation ergonomics before, but one topic I didn't address is lighting. We computer geeks like it dark. Really dark. Ideally, we'd be in a cave. A cave … with an internet connection. The one thing that we can't abide is direct overhead lighting. Every time the ...